Resembling some of the credit deals that brought the housing market crashing to the ground, creative financing courtesy of bail bonding firms in New Jersey threatens to pull the rug out from under a system ostensibly dedicated to insuring defendants show up to face the music in court.

The upshot is that installment-plan deals and zero-percent financing offers effectively undermine a judge’s order, freeing dangerous defendants for amounts far less than a judge intended, the Star-Ledger’s Thomas Zambito reported. And prosecutors say defendants set free on low-percentage bail often return to court with a new charge pending.

Meanwhile, poor defendants who cannot come up with sufficient funds to make bail set on lower-level offenses await trial behind bars – often for months, costing the state about $30,000 and sentencing them to the financial jail of unemployment.

A Drug Policy Alliance study looked at the jail population in New Jersey on a single day in October 2012 and found that about 12 percent of the roughly 13,000 people in jail (more than 1,500 inmates) were there because they couldn’t afford bail of $2,500 or less.

Legislation taking shape now, and expected to be introduced early next year, addresses the system so severely out of balance.

A proposal by Assemblyman John Burzichelli (D-Gloucester) says the thrust of his plan is not to punish bail bondsmen but to ensure that criminal defendants are being given a right to a speedy trial, Zambito reported.

The ideal would be a “system that does not keep people in jail merely because they are poor on one hand, but recognizes on the other that certain defendants accused of violent offenses should be detained pretrial because they’re found to be dangerous,” he wrote.